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On "claiming" a decade

In order to be able to claim that you got the full experience of given decade, how many years prior to the decade would you need to have been born.

It's kind of an interesting question in general. A lot of current "hipster" culture is based on a lot of bands/styles of the 90s. However, I know a few hipster-ish people that claim to be 90s kids that were born around 1989. I say that's bullshit. I was born in 1987, and while I feel as though I remember most of the 90s, I remember very little about the early 90s. Folks who were born after that are really starting to reach the point where they must not remember jack shit about the entire first half of the decade.

I'd also say that if you were born 2 or 3 years into a decade, you're kind of a tweener. You get to pick which decade to associate with!

I was born in '81 and I have almost no memories from the '80s. I sort of remember some pets and one or two traumatic experiences. And the memories I do have don't actually feel like real memories. It feels like recalling things that happened to someone else. I was not engaged in the culture of the time in any way. I did not listen to music and the only stuff I watched was cartoons. I did love '80s cartoons. He-Man, Thundercats and Ninja Turtles were the most important thing in my world. Perhaps this makes me an '80s kid. But I grew up in the culture of the '90s.

I actively engaged in the world around me in a way I had never done before and really haven't since. I may have been born in the '80s but I became a person in the '90s. If you ask me a child is no more a person than a caterpillar is a butterfly. In the '90s I found my wings.

I listened to the UK Top 40 (pop music) every Sunday afternoon and knew every popular band. I watched all the popular tv shows and went to the cinema to see every big movie. I also began consuming the '80s movies being shown on tv, particularly classic action movies that would be shown quite late at night. A lot of my favourite films from that time are still favourites of mine today. But to me '80s movies are just another part of being a '90s person. They may have been made in the '80s but they were not shown endlessly on tv until the '90s. My personality and general attitude towards life was also set during this decade. I still didn't really know anything about the world and my political beliefs weren't really formed until the '00s, by which time I was living in the US. But I was me. A fully formed product of the '90s ready to venture out into the world.

During the '00s I started to appreciate '80s music for the first time so that now I have quite an appreciation for all things from that decade. But I still don't associate myself with the '80s. I am the '90s through and through.

I sort of wish I had lived in the US during that time so I could have been exposed to grunge and punk earlier. Maybe actually had a chance to own a skateboard. I would have loved the shit out of that and my life may have turned out quite differently for it. But that's another topic entirely.

To answer your question I suppose I feel like someone needs to become a teenager during a decade to really belong to that decade as fully as possible. I became a teenager during the '90s and, as I've made all too clear, I associate myself immensely with that period. I also feel a strong bond to the '80s now but that came later. And I feel a strong bond to the '00s but definitely weaker and largely tied to political awakenings. I suspect that's pretty much it for me now. I do not ever again expect to feel bonded with any particular decade. I can't say for sure, obviously. Just a guess.

Good thread Bighead. I enjoyed composing that even if nobody is likely to read it!

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” – Bill Hicks

God, that's an annoying internet trend. To be simple, I think being around 10 years old is when you can firmly grasp something enough to remember that place in time way down the line. I remember selective things from earlier, but that's not enough for me to sell myself as a full on 90s kid.

I do love me some 90's music, but 90's TV was awful and I hate when people from my generation pretend that it wasn't. TV is one thing that has definitely gotten better since them. OK, some of the cartoons were pretty good. Those were more my speed in those days anyway. In fairness, nostalgia doesn't actually have to be good. Art can be horrible but still nostalgic, and it's fun to reminisce on the bad stuff as well from time to time. And I don't feel you have to "claim" anything to do so. But it's the people who make constant references to shitty things like Full House that get to me. At that point, it's not nostalgia, it's a guilty pleasure and you're using faux-nostalgia to negate the guilt.

I've never felt especially partial to any decade. I was born in '86 and the early 2000s are nostalgic as hell for me as well.

This is both the most quintessentially early-2000s thing ever, and an amazing piece of nostalgia. Shitty rap-rock? Check. Shitty experimental soda? Check. Early 2000s? Oh yeah, fucking check.

There are few things I hate than being surrounded by a group of people who grew up in the English-speaking world who spontaneously decide to be nostalgic and play every single awful rock, pop or hip-hop tune from the 90s ad infinitum. It is an era I have no patience with.

Sure, some was bad. But you can't write off an entire decade of music.

Anyway, I only listened to the good stuff.

Everyone else who says the same thing is lying. Unless they listened to the same stuff as me.

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” – Bill Hicks

For those who hate 90s music, which decade have you been alive for where the mainstream music we associate with the decade was actually good music?Seriously, none come to mind. 80s music was bad. 00s music was bad. The 90s at least had grunge and a few actually talented female singers make it big. I'm not saying 90s music is the best or anything like that (I don't think I would even qualify a decade of music so broadly), but damn.

Are you sure hipsters are basing their music on the 90's music? I thought that wasn't retro enough for them.

I was born in '88, I guess that's a bit too late to truly consider myself a ninties kid. It was fun though, lots of great memories from back then, as well as some that I'd rather forget about.

As for the music, that was the time when mainstream music was actually good. I wish I were there when grunge was big (sadly at that time I had no idea about what grunge was; whether it's a true genre or not is another matter). There's some fantastic music that came out of that period.

I really don't like grunge, the general 90's sound I find mostly pretty unpleasant. That said, there's plenty of music from the 90's I do like, I'm even guilty of listening to really bad 90's hits when I'm shitfaced, like Teenage Dirtbag bad. Still, 90's music is bad.

I don't even remember posting in this thread though, I was pretty drunk.